We’d spent a couple of hours in my dads workshop and I was super juiced up over using our new pillar drill to drill perpendicular holes in the new knife blank I’m working on.

These holes will be used to pin the handles on and to give the glue extra purchase.

I know, I know, you come here for the Qigong not the knife making. Don’t worry I’ll get to that. You know you can trust me to deliver you something of value every day. Even if it’s only to be entertained for 5 minutes.

Now where was I?

Oh yeah, so whilst eating I was asked my dad this question:

“How do you get really good at something?”

I mean he’s got 50 years of wood working, shop fitting and general building experience under his belt so he seemed like someone with an opinion worth listening to.

But before he could answer the question I kept going.

I started spouting on about needing 10,000 hours to develop a skill, and when I finally stopped rabbiting on I was talking about whether I might have inherited some of his skills.

In typical Zen style that Rinzai himself would be proud of. My father tapped the side of his head and proclaimed inheritance of skills to be:

“Rubbish”

He went on:

“You only inherit your eye colour, skin colour, height and so on from me and your mum. The rest is environment and application. Everything you do, you do by wanting to do it. My dad wasn’t a joiner, I discovered my love of wood through school and became a joiner. Working in that environment exposed me to other things and I thought ‘Hmm, I wouldn’t mind giving that a try’ and so on.”

I was impressed.

And he summed up with:

“You get good at something by doing it.”

And with that I took our empty plates into the kitchen and went back to his workshop to drill more holes.